understand what you read and pray every day, since understanding increases sweet devotion, and when you understand what you sing, you do not lose your concentration to inappropriate thoughts].”38 A wandering mind is almost inevitable when singing what amounts to nonsense syllables.39 Since the choir nuns spent a hefty portion of the day singing Latin texts in the canonical hours, it was critical that this time be well spent in attentive contemplation rather than bored and mechanical rote performance, which too easily gave way to impure distraction.
I have elsewhere argued that the Observance did, in fact, witness a promotion of women’s Latin literacy that has gone unrecognized as pedagogical material. Vernacular hymn translations did not replace the Latin hymns of the Office, but instead were used pedagogically for Latin language instruction that was oriented around the goals of the reform.40 Dominican friars in Teutonia encouraged Dominican women to understand enough liturgical Latin to engage in the Divine Office intelligently and in a way that would foster spiritual devotion. Throughout the later Middle Ages, Dominican friars approached comprehension of liturgical Latin and access to prose texts as separate issues, one of which was essential for their sisters’ spiritual well-being and one of which was irrelevant. Interest in boosting women’s Latin fluency was motivated by this concern alone: that observance of the Office in the manner prescribed by the order serve as a source of contemplation and devotion for the Dominican women of Teutonia.
Chapter Overview
My first chapter contends that, although the Dominicans prioritized preaching and study over liturgical observance among the friars, the Office held pride of place in the lives of the sisters. The legislative and normative documents produced at the foundation of the order demonstrate the central importance of liturgical piety in the regulations for Dominican women. Reconsidering Dominican legislation with close attention to the differences between the expectations for friars and for sisters provides a solid ground from which to approach the spiritual literature and devotional treatises which provide the subject of the remaining chapters. That is, having established what legally constituted the order and the Office, I turn to the vernacular treatises that urged women to observe it.
The second chapter explores the didactic interests of the early fourteenth century in the sermons of Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361) and the German writings of Heinrich Seuse (1295–1366). I argue that observance of the order also serves as a foundational tenet in the spiritual programs of these friars. Although they adopt the mystical concepts of Gelassenheit (detachment) and the ground of the soul from the quasi-heretical Meister Eckhart, both Tauler and Seuse insist that spiritual perfection be pursued with prudence and orderliness. The practices of the Dominican order, prominently including the Divine Office, constitute a form of spiritual training that orders the ground of the soul so that it might receive divine experience. Through presenting the life and liturgy of the order as a spiritual pursuit, Tauler’s sermons and Seuse’s writings offer ways to find divine experience within strict adherence to the Office.
In the third chapter I examine the collections of exemplary lives known as the sisterbooks. These pseudo-hagiographical narratives were collaboratively composed by the Dominican women of Teutonia in the first half of the fourteenth century to memorialize remarkable women of their own communities. Long seen as evidence of feminine mystical hysteria, these narratives seem to celebrate unruly women, and the Observant interest in them has defied explanation. I argue that, far from celebrating rebellious behaviors, the sisterbooks promote observance of the mandates of the order, foremost among which is the Divine Office. In transmitting the sisterbooks, Observants did not co-opt and tame subversive monuments to women’s independent spirituality, but rather promoted a body of edifying literature that had shared their emphases and concerns a century earlier. Finally, I show that the innovative force of the life narratives contained in the sisterbooks is expressed in a combinatorial creativity whereby not only the text but also the liturgical context of a citation is deployed in order to produce a mosaic of spiritual meaning that expands upon but grows out of the Dominican forma vitae.
In Chapter 4 I turn to the fifteenth century to consider the place of the Office in Observant legislation and regulatory documents. The recent explosion of scholarship on the Observance has not systematically examined the place of the liturgy in the fifteenth-century reform. Yet, as perusal of visitation letters and the acts of the General Chapters shows, the liturgy was arguably more important to Observant reformers than it had been to the founders they venerated. The Observants insisted that both friars and nuns revive a strict and zealous performance of the order’s liturgy. Moreover, they developed a pedagogical program aimed at helping the Dominican sisters understand the Office they were bound to observe.
In the final two chapters I examine texts by prominent and prolific Dominican Observant reformers active in the province of Teutonia in the fifteenth century. In Chapter 5 I consider two early fifteenth-century German versions of the patristic writer John Cassian’s Conferences, a set of spiritual dialogues with desert fathers. One version presents a direct and unabridged translation, while the other consists of a loosely inspired sermon cycle worked up into a treatise and known as The Twenty-Four Golden Harps. The Dominican reformer Johannes Nider (d. 1438) was either catalyst or composer of both texts, which were initially both received by the Dominican convent of St. Katherine’s in Nürnberg. The direct translation remains practically unstudied, but the treatise has been taken as evidence both of Nider’s misogyny and of his imposition of a monastic lifestyle on the laity. A comparison of the texts, however, reveals drastically different treatments of Cassian’s statements concerning liturgical performance and visual piety. I argue that Nider held that contemplative visualization was sufficient for lay devotion, but devout recitation of the Office was the foundation on which Dominican women should build their spiritual lives.
In the final chapter I turn to Johannes Meyer (1422/23–1485), a prolific vernacular chronicler and staunch supporter of the Observance, particularly in the women’s branch of the order. Meyer’s Book of Duties, a practical description of a convent’s various jobs, and the Book of the Reformation, a chronicle cum sisterbook of the Observance, both present normative visions for convent life in which the Office plays a pivotal role. Meyer presents community as the most important factor in Observant life and spirituality. For him, the liturgy is both the common task of the Observant community and the means by which this community is founded and defined. The Book of Duties describes a team of sisters collaborating to organize and perform the Office, as well as to prepare the younger generation to assume these duties. In the Book of the Reformation, Meyer shows how public processions and enclosure ceremonies involving the laity define the Observant community by ritual separation, but also underline and celebrate the convent’s embeddedness in and dependence on the surrounding civil society. For Meyer, the Office was the means by which Observant Dominican women would define their communities, reform devotion, and carry the order into the future.
CHAPTER 1
The Office in Dominican Legislation, 1216–1303
De florido orto ecclesie, rose quedam in Alemania prodiere [From the flowery garden of the church, certain roses blossomed forth in Germany].
—Hugh of St. Cher
My epigraph is taken from a letter written by Hugh of St. Cher, a Dominican friar who served as a cardinal and papal legate to Germany. The letter, sent to the provincial of the Dominican province of Teutonia in February 1257, urges him to replant the sweet-smelling roses back into the blossoming garden of the Order of Preachers. These roses, he explains, are none other than the sisters following the Rule of St. Augustine, who had been first placed under the care of the Friars Preachers and then cut off from the order by Innocent IV.1 Hugh’s flowery language was
